“I’m working on a new problem: finding the value of n such that n plus everything else in life makes you feel happy.”
Reading Cameron is an experience that everyone should have at least once in their life. In his writings he manages to describe the void that accumulates inside man, like the rings of a tree. A void that cannot be filled in any way, a solitude for which we are always alone in the various roles we play in life: parent, child, boyfriend, sick person, student. The uniqueness of our lives and also the uniqueness of our solitudes.
As per the author’s tradition, the book is a collection of short stories, seven to be precise, of which only the first is unpublished, while the others have already been published in various forms over the years. One of the already known ones will then be the story that will give the title to the entire work, with the story of Julie and her fears that she wants to face alone, starting with those of the math analysis test (which at first she will not be able to pass). A story that remains impressed for its completeness and the intensity of Julie’s emotional growth in a few pages, which however is not our favorite.
We loved the first text, the unpublished one (“The world of memory”), to the point of tears, perhaps because we consider it the author’s most intimate. Passages that are like fragments of the heart deported into the world of reason. Memory, this continuous looking back that somehow allows us to move forward and to bear the present, as much as we want to deny it to others and ourselves, we live mainly to remain attached to the past, whether it is called mom, dad, school, falling into a frozen lake, the smell of bread.
The dry style of writing reflects the simplicity of the daily life it recounts, and perhaps this is the characteristic we love most about Cameron. Describing the world in a simple way, and the poetry seems to be over; like when you go shopping after work, you stay at home studying for a subject you understand nothing about, you wash the dishes after dinner. A boredom that one day will be remembered with regret.
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Peter Cameron, Paura della matematica, Adelphi, Milano, 2023
Original edition: The remembered world, Memorial day, Fear of math, Excerpts from Swan Lake, Homework, Odd jobs, Fast forward.